PFerrando/Maurice33…No one, at least not me, is saying that total viewers do not matter. What I’m saying is that other factors matter MORE. If you have two series that get identical total viewer numbers but one get more viewers in the 18-49 demographic and one has to be canceled, guess which one is getting the ax? The one with fewer 18-49 viewers.

As to your arguments, it doesn’t matter what is listed first when the ratings are reported. Nielsen breaks down the ratings into every conceivable demographic, based on age, gender, ethnicity, and other minute details that are not available to the public.

As far as what goes on overseas, who really cares whether or not B&B is big in Italy (which it is). CBS isn’t seeing any money from it, so they don’t care one iota about it. If it doesn’t help fill the network’s coffers, it is no use to the broadcast network.

And, no…Y&R does not have a new head writer.

Maurice 33

@ JayTN

That’s what I was also pointing out that demos do matter more than viewers but I just wanted people to understand that viewers do still matter to advertisers.

I’m glad you understand the international system as well as you realize CBS doesn’t own B&B so they don’t see those big dollars that Bell does off of B&B so B&B has to do well domestically. I had to explain this in the case of why Nikita got renewed for season 3 was because CBS owns it and sees most of that international money.

Both B&B and Y&R do well enough domestically to stay on the air for CBS and DAYS keeps its license fee down enough for NBC to keep it on the air.

GH is the only soap where the network would benefit off of its international sales because as you guys already know ABC/Disney owns it but GH isn’t as strong as the rest of the soaps are overseas so domestic numbers matter a bit more.

Thank you on the head writer situation.

Rolls Royce

GH and DOOL look like they are in life support. The other 2 soaps look like they have decent rating. So how long til they cancel aqnother soap. Which one do you think willl be canceled first, GH or DOOL?

William

Y&R was a beast all week I can’t wait to see Monday’s episode.

@ Rolls Royce
Not sure if they’ll be cancelled just yet as the ratings are still healthy enough for NBC to keep DAYS plus Sony is always going to keep that license fee down. If DAYS got cancelled it would be due to the fact that NBC would expand Today to five hours.

As far as GH goes who knows? It seems to be on permanent life support but the move to 2pm and The Revolution’s failure is what’s keeping it on air right now.

Richard

Maurice,

One of the site owners posted here about a month ago that advertisers do not care about the total viewers. The networks do but in daytime the advertisers only care about in daytime the 18-49 Women viewers. And that was reported on another site as well.

The shows and stuff do care about how many viewers they reach totally and they will boast about that. But it is just like the owners of this site reported the other night in one of the cable threads the advertisers only care about the 18-49.

Harry’s Law had over 7 million viewers almost every week. You would think any network would be happy to have that esp. NBC which is suffering in primetime viewers. But the demos stunk. They would rather take a risk at losing those viewers to put on a show that has more younger viewers.

It’s basically the same as what CBS did with ATWT and GL and what ABC did with AMC and OLTL. Sure they were a guaranteed number of viewers each week, but they both would rather take the risk of angering those viewers just to find something that gets a younger audience.

It worked out well for CBS with The Talk and Lets Make A Deal as they are now making more money than they did with ATWT and GL. So far ABC failed big time with The Revolution. But they are winning with The Chew as it is building a younger audience than they had with AMC — now up 34% in the 18-34 demo than AMC was a year ago. Remember even Frons mentioned in one of his statements that ABC was trying to get younger viewers. And they are about 9% lower in total viewership than what AMC was a year ago.

I don’t know about the report that was stated above that AMC still had more DVR viewers. Maybe they do but until DVR viewers begins to bring in the capital that Live plus 1 does, it won’t hold that much weight in how ABC does business.

Sadly at the end of the day ABC is a business. And they want that bottom dollar – capital — so they can stay in business.

Richard

Oh one thing on younger it has been reported on several sites and even mentioned I am told by some of the Days actors that NBC put the mandate down to Days producers to go younger. They want a younger viewership now for Days. Which they have always wanted that thus why they always gave them rewards when they got demos up.

Plus the last 2 weeks NBC finally released press releases for Days — something they haven’t done in awhile. If you look at those 2 they boasted about the 18-34 demo which Days had brought up.

As to the comment by someone that they were surprised Days was down. I have read in several places where many predicted Days would be up this week as there was another death on the show. When they rose 2 weeks ago it was around a death too. I knew there was a lot of hype around this last death so I had kind of expected a rise too. I don’t know who died and how important they were to the show. Maybe it was a case of another death too soon or something.

I think maybe next week all the shows may go up some as I know where I live we are in a major heatwave — set a record high temperate ever recorded here this week — a lot of people are inside when they normally would be in. That may mean more viewers for all the shows.

PFerrando

@Jay…I’m not disputing that Y and R has fallen the most since 2005-2006. And I haven’t actually calc’d the percentages. It is interesting that you chose the 2005-2006 season as your starting point because that was the last year before Y and R started it’s “darkest” age when LML was elevated to Executive Producer and steered the show into unrecognizable territory. I am not surprised there WAS a further drop around that time. Maurice they don’t have any new writers recently to my knowledge, but maybe MAB is listening to the fans. I think things would improve further if Hogan left. He doesn’t understand the show’s history and still writes like he’s heading ATWT. Not saying he’s not a good writer, just NEVER can tell the type or tone of a story fit for the show that’s been number one since the late ’80s.

cc

Demo vs viewers, it all depends who’s doing the spinning and what they want to spin. If I’m an advertiser, I’d want to reach the most viewers at the cheapest rate.

NBC is killing Days themselves by forcing them to go younger, thinking it’ll bring in younger viewers.

CarShark

What I find the most interesting is that The Chew is doing so much better in the 18-34 demo than All My Children at this point last year. One of the things that I keep seeing mentioned is how soap operas are cross-generational, and I’m sure that used to be the case. Grandma watched Guiding Light and As The World Turns in the 50s and 60s. Mom watched General Hospital and All My Children in the 70s and 80s. Auntie watched Young and the Restless and Bold and the Beautiful in the 90s and 2000s. And now the young female of today is ignoring all those shows for Jersey Shore and Pawn Stars.

One thing that’s always confused me as a person just starting to follow soaps is that they always talk about having to cut costs and then it inevitably leads to salary cuts. Why? When there are 25-30 cast members on each one, plus recurring characters, why don’t they try reducing cast first or making regulars into recurring? I watch Bold and the Beautiful and at the rate they’re dropping people, it’s just going to be Kim Matula talking to herself inside of a year.

Robert

Surprised of GH’s rise. Doubt it will continue. Loved Days this week. I think the Lexie dying storyline was too sad, proabably why Days fell.

JayTN

PFerrando…I opted to start with 2005-06 because Brad said in his comment “So, I don’t believe people aren’t watching soaps anymore when around 2005-2006-2007 they ALL had over 3 million viewers per day”, so I just used 2005 as a jumping off point.

I don’t necessarily endorse Brad’s hypothesis (i.e. just as many people are watching today as in 2005), but the percentage of lost viewers may not be as bad as just looking at the daily/weekly viewer totals. Viewers have other options to watch their soaps…DVR’s, SOAPnet (for those who still have it), the internet, etc.

I just find it interesting that Y&R is getting the same numbers today as B&B did back in 2005, while B&B and “Days” have lost about 1 million viewers each and GH has lost only about 600,000 viewers. That’s not really that big of a decline when you take a look at how many viewers some primetime shows have lost in the same time period (although the percentages for these soaps would be higher since they started with fewer viewers to begin with).

DryedMangoez

For Days, are these the numbers for the week of Lexie’s death or did she did the week before?

Richard

Jay, I do think many people are watching online and such. And I do think that many stockpile stuff on their DVR and watch it later — much later. I hear people on the Internet who say they may tape a whole 2 to 3 weeks and then watch. Some say they watch all the episodes and some say they don’t.

I will say I am surprised that according to reports many areas have lost SoapNet now but yet the live plus 1 and the season to date ratings have not gone up much. Did people just decide to tune out? The only soap still showing a rise is B&B and it has never been on SoapNet. Where are those viewers going?

What I don’t get is people feeling so entitled that they think advertisers and the networks should cater to their viewing habits and count that. I read a comment on some site this morning one lady who was so angered that because she doesn’t watch GH within 7 days that her viewing doesn’t count. She was issuing her threats and demands to ABC.

The networks have to set some kind of standard. I mean they have expanded to counting the 7 day viewing even though it still doesn’t matter much in the long run if a show is cancelled or not.

The lady I mentioned said what does it matter when she watches a toilet paper commercial as long as she watches it. What some don’t get it is not just product commercials. Some advertise sales, special promotional items, networks advertise events, stories, etc. What good is it to an advertiser if you don’t watch said commercial until after the promotion or the sale ends. And what good is it to a network if they spend big promotional dollars to advertise a story (esp. those hard fought for daytime promo dollars in primetime) if that person doesn’t watch said promo until after that event has happened.

Those networks and advertisers just blew a huge chunk of money for nothing.

And until something comes along to fix that you will never see advertisers putting as much importance on DVR viewers as they do those live viewers they know they at least have a chance of reaching right then or within 24 hours.

Richard

Dryed — From what I read somewhere else these are for the week of the death.

Richard

Oh Jay,

Did you notice the big rise in Monday’s rating and viewers for GH. They came up from the Friday before from a 1.6 to a 2.0 on Monday, plus a big rise in viewers. But then they dropped all the way back down in viewers and to a 1.7 for the rest of the week.

That just seemed unreal to me. Something intrigued viewers to tune in and then tune right back out.

CarShark

To me the continued peril of soaps underscores how important live viewing still is, and how unimportant everything else is. DVR, online on network sites, online on Youtube, OnDemand, even SoapNet by this point. The only one I can see changing that in the short term is CBS. I don’t know how many here watch show on CBS’s online section (formerly Innertube), but it basically has a full commercial load. Eight minutes of program. Four commercials. They even make sure to mix in a couple of those awful full screen commercials that are a pain to mute and you have to actually click a button to move forward. It’s more of a pain in the butt that way, but if people still watch things that way, it could be worth it.

g-man

No advertisers are buying soaps based on total viewers, they are buying them on W18-49 and W18-34. As long as they can keep catering to those viewers they will survive, if not, the networks will seek out lower cost options to replace them.

Richard

CarShark, I think we will see more and more commercials with online viewing.

I am at a place this summer that we don’t have satellite or cable TV so what I watch is online.

The biggest gripe I have is that some of the cable networks can be really slow at getting their stuff online to watch. I think they do that to get more people to watch live or on DVR in a shorter period of time. So they don’t make it available online that soon.

But I have definitely noticed more commercials and commercials that you can’t skip on certain things.

Personally that is the reason I cancelled my Hulu membership though. I think it was Hulu. I got tired of how often they stopped even the movies to show a commercial. We switched to Netflix. They don’t update their TV programs with fresh episodes like Hulu does that often. But at least there are no commercials.

Roy

It is incomprehensible to me how Days has stayed on the air. There is gross mismanagement at the top. Firing Gary Tomlin then hiring him back less than a year later??? Hiring horrible writers Darrell Ray Thomas and whats-her-name… Mcpherson (?) after just getting rid of another horrible writer (Dena Higley). The show looked better for awhile, acting improved. But the stories, absolutely hideous… Now they’ve hired Lisa De Cazotte and the show looks horrible again. Basically, it’s the people who ran Passions. Days is flailing, flopping on the deck like a fish sucking for air. DAYS SHOULD BE CANCELLED. NBC should be ashamed they’ve let this go on. Ken Corday and Greg Meng are inept.

Jan

I read somewhere that General Hospital will be moved to the 1 pm time slot. That will put it against Days of Our lIves and I believe a lot of viewers watch Days and then an hour later go to General. I wonder if that will give the powers that be the reason to cancel one or both program..I know I will be faithful to “Days fo Our Lives” and have been for 46 years..How many talk shows and cooking shows can we deal with in a day..??